Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public description of how they are working in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment : We built a Software Factory : non-interactive development where specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and conv...

It’s been a long time since we plucked my magic twanger, I know. No, I have not forgotten how to blog.  I just haven’t had the time, or the energy.  Too much else to do, too many projects, too many deadlines, and I was behind on everything.   Too much death as well; we lost some close friends during the last few months, along with artists, writers, and other celebrities whose work meant a lot to us, even if we did not know them personally.  I wanted to talk about all of that. Oh, an...

There was recently an attempt by an independent journalist to expose fraud in a Minnesota social program. It was deeply frustrating; the journalist had notably poor epistemic standards, which secondary media seized upon to dismiss their result. The class-based sniffing almost invariably noted that prestige media had already reported stories which rhymed with the core allegation, while sometimes implying that makes the allegations less likely to be true, through a logical pathway which is mys...

TL;DR: I built Command Book, a native macOS app that gives your long-running terminal commands a permanent home. Free to download at commandbookapp.com . Terminal pain points I’ve been a terminal power user for over 20 years. And I’m done using terminal tabs as a process manager. Here’s why. It’s a familiar tale. You sit down to work in the morning and you have to get a host of apps up and running before you can start coding. Maybe your terminal looks a bit like this. ---------...

In which I show how to configure a few different tools to make the terminal more pleasurable to use In which I show how to configure a few different tools to make the terminal more pleasurable to use

SINGAPORE (February 5, 2026) — Shield AI today announced the expansion of their partnership with Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) and the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) to co-develop and proliferate Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a wider range of autonomous drone applications using Shield AI’s Hivemind software development kit (SDK). Building on existing explorations and early use cases, the expansion looks to develop and embed autonomous capabilit...

Suppose we have reached endgame capitalism. Suppose we have colonized the worlds as in Ender's Game. How should we manage our stock portfolio? Investing in many uncorrelated assets de-risks your position. In 2026, there are not enough sufficiently uncorrelated assets for complete de-risking. In Ender's Game, there are. There are so many in fact that, when every investor distributes his wealth along N investments, all investors continue to be ~uncorrelated. Capital will now run away risk-free. Wh...

SaaS is the most profitable business model on Earth. 1 It’s easy to understand why: build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales. I have been writing software for more than half my life. In the last year itself, I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and operators in SF, from preseed to Series E companies. AI is bringing an existential threat to a lot of B2B SaaS executives: How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every cu...

In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio and live broadcast for decades, so he enjoyed the experience as the engineer not on duty! In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NH...

The keen eyed among you will have noticed that things have been quiet around here recently, and that's because I've been working away on a new project: Pure Blog . Pure Blog is a simple PHP based blogging platform that has a lovely little CMS in the background to help you manage your content. Everything is based on Markdown, and all the content is stored in plaintext files, just like an SSG. Why Pure Blog? Well, dear reader, back in September I announced my Jekyll CMS, Hyde . After conti...

The trajectory of a storm, the evolution of stock prices, the spread of disease — mathematicians can describe any phenomenon that changes in time or space using what are known as partial differential equations. But there’s a problem: These “PDEs” are often so complicated that it’s impossible to solve them directly. Mathematicians instead rely on a clever workaround. They might not know how to… Source The trajectory of a storm, the evolution of stock prices, the spread of disease ...

And he will never never never never never never never get to meet you And I got to meet you Yeah, I got to meet you. — Mikey Mike I write in praise of the ones we love: their weaknesses and fears and nobility, their moments of madness, their genius. Sometimes we hold each other and feel stronger, safer, better. Sometimes we stand in opposite corners and hurl things at each other: words, accusations, feelings, disappointments. And worse.  We can be so cruel. We get so confused. But...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Thursday 5 February 2026 in Portland, Oregon. I started writing this on Monday. It’s not been great. I have a podcast now. Yeah, I know. Everyone has a podcast. Podcasts are over. If you know me well, you’ll also know that I’m incapable of listening to podcasts, my attention wanders and then it’s background noise and I realize I have no idea what anyone’s talking about. Benjamin Bell suggested on LinkedIn that I could use AI to clone my voice and make ...

The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. I have joined OpenAI to work on this challenge directly, with an initial focus on ChatGPT performance. The scale is extreme and the growth is mind-boggling. As a leader in datacenter performance, I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough – I'm thinking of new engineering methods...

It's been a year since I invited Americans to join us in a pledge to Share the American Dream : 1. Support organizations you feel are  effectively helping  those most in need across America right now . 2. Within the next five years, also contribute  public dedications of time or funds towards longer term efforts  to keep the American Dream fair and attainable for all our children. Stay gold, America. 💛 Personally, I’ve become a big believer in one particular quote, especially conside...

Wandering around maze known as the Computer Science building at Oxford I found the computer science library. Rarely these days do you see a library (and a librarian) devoted to computer science. The librarian found their copy of The Golden Ticket and asked me to inscribe and sign it, just like at Dagstuhl , perhaps the only other active CS library I know of. It brought back memories of the early 90s when I would often head to the  Math/CS library at the University of Chicago to track down s...

One of the areas of the Artemis codebase that I update the most is the logic that relates to the list of posts published by authors to which a user is subscribed. Because Artemis works with so many different formats of information – web feeds like RSS or h-feed, Mastodon posts, Bluesky posts – there can often be subtle bugs that appear every so often. Early on in the development of the project, I added a “debug” mode which lets me see the JSON record for a post in my reader. This JSON re...

I was chatting with Kevin earlier today, and since he’s unhappy with his mindless phone usage , I proposed a challenge to him: for the next 4 weeks, each Sunday, we’re gonna publish screenshots of our screen time usage as well as some reflections and notes on how the week went. If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts. I experimented with phone usage in the past and I know that I can push screen time usa...

Books to be destructively scanned by Anthropic, via the Washington Post . Welcome to the reading list, a look at what happened this week in infrastructure, buildings, and building things. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer essay about US construction productivity that should be out next week. Sending the reading list a day early this week. Housing Goldman Sachs has a ...

I don't have any contacts at Zendesk, but I'm noticing another massive wave of spam from their platform: If you're seeing this and either work at Zendesk or know someone that does, please have them actually treat this as an issue and not hiding behind "just delete the emails lol" . I don't have any contacts at Zendesk, but I'm noticing another massive wave of spam from their platform: If you're seeing this and either work at Zendesk or ...

The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the charge with innovations in this space, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of these tools. Birgitta Böckeler explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example. more...

CI In a Box Feb 6, 2026 I wrote box , a thin wrapper around ssh for running commands on remote machines. I want a box-shaped interface for CI: const repository = "git@forge.com/me/my-project" ; const commit_sha = Deno . env [ "COMMIT" ]; const runners = await Promise . all ( [ "windows-latest" , "mac-latest" , "linux-latest" ] . map ( ( os ) => $ `box create ${os} ` ) ); await Promise . all (runners. map ( async ($runner) => { awa...

pycparser is my most widely used open source project (with ~20M daily downloads from PyPI [1] ). It's a pure-Python parser for the C programming language, producing ASTs inspired by Python's own . Until very recently, it's been using PLY: Python Lex-Yacc for the core parsing. In this post, I'll describe how I collaborated with an LLM coding agent (Codex) to help me rewrite pycparser to use a hand-written recursive-descent parser and remove the dependency on PLY. This has been an interesti...